#TFT14 Kiran Pabbathi, Top 5 issues in ITSM consulting

Kiran Kumar Pabbathi

Top 5 Issues in ITSM consulting projects and its

mitigation methods

Top 5 Issues in ITSM consulting projects and its mitigation methods

Kiran Kumar Pabbathi (ITILv3 ® Expert, PRINCE2 ® Practitioner, MCP – MS

Sharepoint 2003, MCTS – MS Project 2007, Six Sigma- GB, ISO/IEC20K, TMap & Cloud Computing - Foundation) Author of the books “PDCA for ITIL” (published by TSO,

UK) and “Guidance for ITAM” (published by Servicemanagers.org)

About the speaker

Kiran is a certified professional in ITIL v3 ® Expert, PRINCE2 ® (Practitioner), Six Sigma Green Belt, MCP in SharePoint 2003 Customizations, MCTS in MS Project 2007, ISO/IEC20K -F, Cloud Computing - F, and TMAP – F (Test Management Professional). I am a BCA (Bachelors in Computer Applications) and MBA - Information Technology graduate from the city Hyderabad, located in the southern part of India. I have totally 11 years of experience in IT Industry, 2 years in software development and 9 plus years of hardcore experience in ITSM domain.

I worked as a service desk analyst, incident analyst, problem analyst, technical writer, quality assurance analyst, process consultant, project and process manager which gave me thorough knowledge and understanding on ITSM. Currently I work as a Quality and Process Manager in Shanghai Bizenit Information Technology (www.bizenit.com). Our company is focused in developing cost effective and reliable IAM (Identity and Access Management) solutions, Oracle Identity and Access management product implementations, ITIL trainings and consulting.

http://www.bizenit.com/

About the speaker

I am also the author of the books:

• “PDCA for ITIL – Metrics, CSFs and workflows for implementing ITIL practices” published by TSO, UK (ISBN 9780117082076) which provides a direction for implementing ITIL processes and designing ITSM solutions. Published in August 2013

• “Guidance for ITAM – Step by step implementation guide with workflows, metrics, best practices and checklists” published by Servicemanagers.org (ISBN 9780991320509) which provides a direction for implementing ITAM processes and designing ITAM solutions. Published in February 2014

Agenda

• Introduction to the topic

• Back to Basics

• Top 5 Issues and its mitigation methods

• Guideposts for ITSM consulting teams

• Common errors in ITSM consulting projects

• Metrics for ITSM Consulting teams

• Questions

Introduction to the topic

Today many ITSM consultants, all over the world are facing numerous issues in

ITSM consulting projects (be it process consulting or tool consulting), and the

reasons are:

• Increasing complexity in IT environment (with the evolution of cloud computing, BYOD, big data, etc)

• Changing requirements from the clients

• Evolution of new best practices, standards, etc

• Increasing compliance requirements from government and legal institutes

Back to basics

Planning

Analyzing

Designing Evaluating

Implementing & training

What is ITSM (IT Service Management) process consulting? ITSM process consulting is the activity which involves planning, analyzing, designing, evaluating, implementing and training of the developed ITSM best practices. (Also it involves the continuous improvement initiative)

Back to basics

What is ITSM Process consulting team?

ITSM consulting team generally comprises of:

• Process manager

• Process consultants

• Process developers

• Quality analysts

• Technical writers

Process manager

Process consultants

Process developers

Quality analysts

Technical writers

Top 5 issues in ITSM consulting projects

1. Why process definition and implementation? let’s go for straight away tool

implementation!

2. Understanding the requirements

3. Selection of the best practice

4. ITIL framework implementation is very costly & time consuming

5. Process adherence & awareness


1. Why process definition and implementation? let’s go for straight away tool

implementation!

All organizations primary goal is cost cutting and they are with the approach

“Why process definition and implementation (wasting time and money), let’s go

for straight away tool implementation!”;

Organizations assume that straight away tool implementation would reduce the

complexity, costs, time and efforts, and if this is done it would become the

greatest disaster for organizations (in terms of costs, time and efforts).

So getting the confidence, enlightening and convincing the customer that

‘process definition and implementation pre-dominates the tools implementation’

is the number 1 issue for all ITSM consultants.

Hence consultants should enlighten and make the customers understand that no

ITSM tool can meet all the business requirements (in terms of scope, priorities,


integration with other applications) in such a way that it can straight away be

deployed in the IT infrastructure and IT staff can utilize and optimize the tools.

Because every individual organization has its own priorities, requirements, goals,

pain points and risks.

Hence, before implementing any tool, an organization has to define a process

addressing and consolidating all the objectives, scope, roles and responsibilities,

risks, issues, and then accordingly tool has to be developed/ purchased and then

deployed.


Mitigation method

1. ITSM consultants should initially begin with simple process diagrams (without delving into different kinds of process collaterals and consulting approaches) depicting the ‘as-is’ and ‘would be’ status of IT infrastructure; highlighting and demarcating the: scope of the work, communication flow, integrations with other business processes or departments, roles and responsibilities, interfaces, and etc.

2. ITSM consultants should elucidate the advantages of process definition, highlighting that: process would act as a baseline and as a backbone for IT operations, process would provide a previse understanding on the long term and short term goals, process would provide better clarity in requirements and information flow, process would identify the risks, issues and dependencies (giving a better picture), process would provide thorough awareness on the business operations (to all technical and non-technical stakeholders), process would provide easily understandable documentation for all audiences.


2. Understanding the requirements

Today world class MNC’s & Consulting firms are executing the ITSM consulting

projects in an offshore model, where 1 or 2 process consultants are at customer’s

location (for a while) and the rest of the process development, testing, and

documentation team is at offshore location. (Good for customers or clients – in

consideration with cost savings. Chaotic for process development and testing team

– in consideration with unclear requirements, vague knowledge on customer’s IT

infrastructure, tardy communications and etc).

Understanding the requirements thoroughly and effectively plays the most

important task for any ITSM consulting projects. If the consultants and process

developers are working in customer premises (onsite), most of the discrepancies

in understanding requirements can be eliminated with continuous reviews,

feedbacks and discussions.


Mitigation method

In consideration with discrepancies that can happen while working from offshore

premises, here are some suggestions how to capture and gather detailed,

complete and accurate requirements:

1. Define and demarcate the requirements as Business requirements (defining the business need and logics), Functional requirements (defining the functionality of the proposed system), User requirements (requirements in consideration with different types of users), Design and Technical requirements (in consideration with the architectures, high level and low level design, technological aspects like availability, capacity, security, etc), and Non functional requirements (in consideration with user friendliness, accessibility, etc)

2. Perform SIPOC (Supplier, Inputs, Process, Outputs, and Customers) analysis in consideration with the requirements, objectives, issues, risks, dependencies, etc.

3. Perform MoSCoW analysis on requirements to identify and understand what is ‘Must’, ‘Should’, ‘Could’ and ‘Would be in future’.


3. Selection of the best practice

Unfortunately and fortunately there are many best practices available for ITSM,

and that arises an issue for customers which makes them to think profoundly

‘What is the best ITSM practice that I should adopt in my organization?‘

And another issue is ‘Insistence from customers to define processes as per a

specific best practice only’, for example:

• If a customer is an American, he insists that he wants to define ITSM processes only as per COBIT;

• If a customer is from UK, he insists that he wants to implement the processes as per ITIL only;

• And another customer says that I want to implement the processes only as per MOF.

These acute, biased preferences from the customer makes the consultants job

more difficult and takes them to a groove.


Mitigation method

ITSM consultants should educate the clients that adherence and alignment to a

‘specific ITSM best practice’ (only) is not a good idea, as there would be pros and

cons for every individual best practice. So implementing ITSM processes as per a

specific best practice (be it ITIL/ MOF/ COBIT/ etc) would also carry forward the

flaws, misses, risks into the organization’s environment.

Hence the efficacy of an ITSM consultant is to take the best from all best

practices and customize them as per the needs of the business requirements; So

an ITSM consultant should refer and take the guidance from all the best practices

(ITIL, COBIT, MOF and etc), standards (ISO/IEC20K, ISO/IEC27001, ISO/IEC27005,

etc) and previous consulting experiences to develop effective processes and its

respective collaterals.

For example: A consultant can refer the ITIL/ MOF books to define the processes,

process activities, and workflows; COBIT books to define the governance


mechanism, controls, checklists, generic goals, roles and responsibilities etc; and

standards to define standard operating procedures (SOP), guidelines, auditing

checklists, etc.

So the consulting team can refer different best practices, and bring out the best

from all the best practices.


4. Implementing ITIL framework is very costly & time consuming task

Generally customers are afraid, skeptic of ITIL framework implementations and

its positive results, as ITIL is a humungous framework which comprises of 28

processes and 4 functions. Well, obviously this involves great costs, resources

and time.

Mitigation method

Implementing all ITIL framework (all 28 processes and 4 functions) would

evidently cost millions of dollars and 4-5 years of time duration without any

doubts. Hence ITSM consultants should scope the ITSM process development

project into a phased approach. Consultants should enlighten the customers that

the consulting team and organizational IT management would identify the most

critical, prioritized issues first and then they would implement necessary


processes/ functions in a phased approach delivering visible results after every

process implementation.

Consultants should identify the major pain points in infrastructure (prioritizing

them), its root causes, dependencies, then accordingly they should determine

which process would be apt to start with, which process can bring in results for

the IT department and Organization to reach its business goals.

For example:

A company is having issues with its IT, where there are regular outages and also

takes very long time to restore the services. (Let’s assume there are no defined

processes)

Now a consultant would analyze and assess the complete business scenario

(in terms of number of outages on an average per month, time taken to fix the

issue, time taken to restore the services, what was the reference material used to

fix the issues, how many technical members were involved to fix the issues, how


many of those were recurring issues, what is the root cause of the issues, what is

the business impact of the outages with respect to number of users, costs &

penalizations, what is the strategy of the organization and finally the budget for

IT department) and then he/ she would define a service desk function (with

defined roles, responsibilities, operating procedures, metrics, etc) which will act

as a SPOC for any information, requests, and complaints that will consolidate

accurate information about the issues reported by its end users.

Then the consultant would define the incident management process (with defined

roles, responsibilities, operation and escalation procedures, metrics, etc) and then

problem management process (with defined roles, responsibilities, operating and

escalation procedures, metrics, etc) followed by developing a knowledge base for all

individual teams - service desk, incident management and problem management.

In this way, scoping of ITSM processes demonstrates benefits in short time period and

will also align towards the long-term goals.


5. Process adherence & awareness

In one of my consulting experience, I have understood (after all the process

development and implementation) that some of the key stakeholders were

reluctant to follow the process, and some were not even aware of the process.

Effective process definition is a very vital task for organizations, and strict

adherence, complete awareness on the defined process is explicitly mandatory.

Among the 4P’s (People, Processes, Products and Partners) of ITSM, the first P

‘People’ acts as a main foundation and is also a secret for successful

implementation and to demonstrate positive results.

And this ‘People’ involves IT management, operational managers, administrators

and also other staff including end users; all of these stakeholders should adhere

and have perfect awareness of the developed processes for effective and

efficient management of IT.


Mitigation method

Involvement of all the key stakeholders right from the process planning,

implementation and trainings is very much necessary for the success of process

consulting projects.

Involving the key stakeholders in brainstorming sessions and conducting regular

reviews, will enable in getting frank opinions, important suggestions and their

observations with respect to their previous experiences.

Also it gives them a feeling that the process was developed based on their

opinions and reviews, which makes them to follow and adhere to the process

very strictly.

Not only that it also helps in winning the hearts of stakeholders for better human

relationship and also for further business opportunities.

Process awareness among the stakeholders can be developed by:


• Conducting regular (monthly/ quarterly) trainings, assessments, quizzes, etc.

• Developing a management initiative that rewards the staff, who scores maximum in the assessments.

• Creating simple & understandable process diagrams in posters and placing them in every kiosks and meeting rooms, to propagate the importance of processes.

• Creating posters highlighting the IT benefits and Business benefits (when the team adheres to the processes).

Guideposts for ITSM consulting teams

ITSM consulting team should

have real experience in

ITSM

ITSM process designing is not

copy-pasting

Risk analysis and mitigation must for every

ITSM consulting project.

Selection of the right tool


Guidepost 1: ITSM consulting team with real experience and knowledge

I have seen management hiring and promoting staff as process developers/

consultants just because they don’t have technical skills and they have stayed

in a company for long term in an organization. This is a blunder.

Select the ITSM consulting and process designing team who has real

experience in ITSM, who has seen real scenarios, experienced real issues

in ITSM departments. As people who have seen real issues (continuously) can

bring impeccable solutions based on their experiences, technical knowledge

and their innovative thinking.

Having theoretical knowledge from books, certifications (is a must) is good

but not strong enough to develop efficient processes/ solutions in consulting

or process development.


Guidepost 2: ITSM process designing is not copy-pasting

Its so shocking that I have seen some consultants who do copy-pasting from

ITIL books and call it as ‘process development’.

Well, ITSM process designing is not copy-pasting and rephrasing the content

from ITIL or MOF or COBIT books, it is bringing out the practical solutions for

the real issues happening at customer premises. Hence ITSM consulting team

should have people, who have real experience in ITSM departments and ITSM

consulting skills, not people with incompatible experiences.

An excellent ITSM consulting team doesn’t require a group of evangelists

from ITIL or MOF or COBIT; it requires ITSM consultants who are cognizant

about different ITSM best practices who knows the pros and cons of different

best practices, who can bring ‘out of the box’ solutions for the real issues.


Guidepost 3: Risk analysis and mitigation must for every ITSM consulting

project.

Risk analysis and mitigation is the area which is ignored in many of the ITSM

process consulting projects, leading to failures or inappropriate process

developments.

Typical risks in consulting projects are:

• Requirements creep/ changes in requirements

• Schedule lags

• Lack of stakeholders involvement

• Lack of reviews (at regular intervals) while the processes are being developed

• Ineffective communication among the stakeholders

• Ambiguity in process documentation deliverables

Hence process consultants should always have a constant watch on risks and

plan appropriate mitigation methods.


Guidepost 4: Selection of the right tool

ITSM tools are very necessary as it can:

• eliminate routine human work and human errors

• automate the routine tasks, saving time

• follow a defined workflow without reinventing procedures and taking approvals again and again

Criteria for tool selection should be primarily based on:

a) organization’s strategy

b) core functionality

c) costs and pricing

d) organization’s infrastructure and architecture

e) usability and visualization

Common errors

Err 1: Consideration of ITSM process implementation program as a typical

IT project

ITSM process implementations should never be treated as a typical IT projects

which has specific start date and end date. Typical IT projects deliver

outcomes, after the project is completed (after the proposed end date) and

the stakeholders would be able to experience the value very clearly.

But ITSM process implementation projects are not like typical IT projects

which show off the outcomes or ROI or VOI right after completing the project,

since process definition & implementation is like the directives or blueprints

which has to be followed by the operations team and then the operations and

management teams would be able to see the difference in outcomes.

Secondly ITSM process development and implementation programs can never

be marked with an acute end date as ITSM process development

Common errors

is always bonded with continuous improvement approach which gives

continuous or periodic feedbacks and with respect to the feedbacks the

process has to be redefined or updated.

Hence organizational top level management should understand that process

definition and implementation is not a typical IT project, it should be

considered as an ongoing program.

Common errors

Err 2: Appointing inappropriate people for the most crucial roles.

Today in many reputed organizations, management presumes that a ‘2’ digit

years of experience in some ‘X’, ‘Y’, ‘Z’ roles is an asset for an organization;

and some management folks assume ‘grey hair’ as a symbol and

exemplification of knowledge.

For example: “A resource having 10-15 years of experience in car driving, is

good enough for driving a car (only) and cannot drive an airplane with the

previous car driving experience and skills”.

Assigning well versed, knowledgeable resources as subordinates and

underdogs for some dumb people will be the greatest err.

Hence organizational management should carefully understand who has the

right knowledge, exposure, experience, skills, etc and accordingly they should

appoint the resources with the respect to the roles.

Common errors

Err 3: No encouragement and support for grooming consultants knowledge

(like trainings and certifications).

ITSM consulting team needs good encouragement and management support

for grooming the staff’s knowledge on evolving, ever changing best practices,

standards, and methodologies. As it is very much evident that the inception

of new best practices, standards and methodologies is happening

continuously, year after year; in the same way consulting team should be

equipped with the updating or evolving knowledge areas.

As discussed above, ITSM consulting team doesn’t require ITIL/ COBIT/ MOF

evangelists it needs consulting team who has knowledge on all of the

contemporary best practices, standards and methodologies for bringing out

the best from all the reference materials.

Hence management should identify the right human resources (‘who wants

to snug in a company’ and ‘who has passion and innovative thinking’) and then

Common errors

support them without showing any bias (based on years of experience in an

organization, nationality, sex, religion, caste, etc).

Metrics for Consulting teams 1. Time taken to develop a process and its collaterals

2. Number of resources and mandays required for process development

3. Number of resources and mandays required for process testing

4. Number of resources and mandays required for technical writing

5. Number of defects found by process testing team (in all process collaterals)

6. Number of defects (typo’s, confusions, grammatical errors) found in process documentation

7. Number of defects found by end users and customer teams

8. Number of documentation deliverables (process guides, standard operating procedures, work instructions, role & responsibilities) available on a process

9. Number of NC’s (Non-conformances) found in audits with respect to process

10.Number of areas where there is no documentation available

11.Number of process trainings provided

12.Customer satisfaction rating on process documentation provided

13.Customer satisfaction rating on process trainings and trainer

Questions

Thank you

With thanks to our slides sponsor, CA Technologies

Try Nimsoft for free at

ca.com/NSD-trial

http://bit.ly/1df6jY7









Date post:	20-Aug-2015
Category:	Business
Upload:	tft-presentations-tomorrows-it-service-future-today
View:	1,515 times
Download:	1 times